![\"\"](\"http:\/\/totfc.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/07\/warriorRIP.jpg\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Throughout my life and all the years that I\u2019ve been brogging, I\u2019ve named many wrestlers, and declared them among my favorites.\u00a0 CM Punk, Chris Benoit, the Big Boss Man, etc, etc.\u00a0 It\u2019s not due to the\u00a0unfortunate recent event of his passing<\/a>, but I can truthfully say without any hesitation that my first ever favorite wrestler was the Ultimate Warrior.<\/span><\/p>\n I always picked Ultimate Warrior (and Honky Tonk Man)\u00a0when playing the 1989 arcade\u00a0WWF Superstars<\/em><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n When I was eight-years old, I once went to school with rubberbands around my non-existent prepubescent triceps with twist-ties draped off of them and declared myself the Ultimate Warrior.\u00a0 My teacher made me take them off because she believed that they were cutting off circulation in my arms.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n The first time I saw Ultimate Warrior in action was in a match against Haku, on\u00a0Prime Time Wrestling<\/em>, which starred Gorilla Monsoon and Bobby \u201cThe Brain\u201d Heenan.\u00a0 I swear to god Warrior did at least nine clotheslines in that match, which he naturally won.<\/span><\/p>\n I was devastated in 1991 when Ultimate Warrior lost the world title to Sgt. Slaughter, due to outside interference from Sensational Sherry and the Macho King, when Randy Savage smashed his glass scepter on Warrior\u2019s head.\u00a0 I still thought wrestling was \u201creal\u201d then, so to a nine-year old, watching your favorite wrestler lose was adequate reasons for some shell shock.<\/span><\/p>\n I\u00a0always picked Ultimate Warrior when\u00a0WWF Wrestlefest<\/em>\u00a0<\/a>released in arcades in 1991.<\/span><\/p>\n When the Undertaker sneak-attacked the Ultimate Warrior during a\u00a0Funeral Parlor<\/em>\u00a0segment and then stuffed him into a casket, where he portrayed passing out after running out of air, I became scared out of my wits of the Undertaker.<\/span><\/p>\n When Papa Shango \u201ccursed\u201d the Ultimate Warrior, and there was a segment of him \u201cvomiting\u201d in the trainer\u2019s room, I developed a temporary belief and fear of voodoo magic.<\/span><\/p>\n Needless to say, I was a very impressionable and gullible kid back then, but none of these memories were remotely at all difficult to recollect, because the Ultimate Warrior was my favorite wrestler.<\/span><\/p>\n Back when I was in high school, and I was already educated and smarky about the business, my friends and I had already heard all the rumors and the jokes, about how the Ultimate Warrior was dead, and that they\u2019ve had several different guys portraying him throughout the later years.\u00a0 We even ran with the joke for a spell, and came up with our own wild hypothetical scenario that somewhere out in the middle of nowhere (Parts Unknown) stood a temple, known as\u00a0The<\/em>\u00a0Temple, where there were numerous men in robes who served there, and when an Ultimate Warrior died, a new robed man within the temple would pull back his hood, revealing a man with a wild hairdo and the iconic Ultimate Warrior face paint, thus giving birth to the next Ultimate Warrior; who would then emerge, enter the business and resume shaking ropes and giving incoherent babbling promos as his predecessors did.<\/span><\/p>\n But in reality, there weren\u2019t multiple Ultimate Warriors, there was no The Temple, or no number of dead preceding Ultimate Warriors.\u00a0 (Yes, I know there\u2019s a remark about the Ultimate Warrior WCW counterfeit AKA The Renegade, who is ironically dead as well.)\u00a0 There was always just one Ultimate Warrior, born James Hellwig, who later legally changed his name to Warrior, believing that it would give him legal right to the name over the WWE (which I\u2019m not entirely sure if it worked), that ever existed.<\/span><\/p>\n And now, unfortunately, he is no longer with us.<\/span><\/p>\n I\u2019ve written about lots of wrestlers who have passed in the past, and in most cases the basic message is the same: another wrestler gone way too early.\u00a0 At just 54 years old, the Ultimate Warrior falls into that category as well.\u00a0 Some wrestler deaths have been legitimately shocking (Benoit), most others are usually sentimental for ironic (Big Boss Man) or humorous (Viscera) reasons, and then there are some that are just plain tragically sad (Randy Savage, Eddie Guerrero), but I don\u2019t not miss any one of those guys, and definitely feel empathy for their families for their losses.<\/span><\/p>\n But the passing of the Ultimate Warrior kind of encapsulates all of the above in his passing, because at least once, he fell into every one of those categories throughout his existence, and on top of that, he was my first-ever favorite wrestler as a kid, so it is somewhat notable to me that such an outrageously crazy character\u2019s passing invokes some melancholy emotions.<\/span><\/p>\n Certainly, the circumstances behind his death are conveniently ready for skepticism, but in the end, I still think it\u2019s a tragic freak accident, probably not aided by an abusive past lifestyle of steroids and other drugs that professional wrestlers were notorious for being associated with.\u00a0 He collapsed in a parking lot in the company of his wife, instead of being found dead in a hotel room with bottles of pills and booze strewn about, so I\u2019d like to rule out the possibility of a planned suicide.\u00a0 But despite my knee-jerk reaction that something seemed amiss, I don\u2019t think it was suicide, even if, in his last televised appearances, two days before his passing, he\u00a0basically gave his own eulogy<\/a>\u00a0to a raucous New Orleans crowd.<\/span><\/p>\n Despite the fact that in more recent years, he seemed to harbor a lot of animosity towards all known past associates, be it wrestlers, promoters, Vince McMahon and Hulk Hogan to name a few, we can at least take solace in the fact that the last words he said to a public audience were coherent, gracious, and full of acknowledgement and gratitude that without us wrestling fans, the Ultimate Warrior would never have become the legend he was.<\/span><\/p>\n In conclusion: farewell Jim Hellwig, the Ultimate Warrior.\u00a0 You may have been a target of bad jokes, political disagreement, criticism over your performance capabilities and rambling promos, and questionability over your own identity and whether or not you had clones out there.\u00a0 But there\u2019s no denying the fact that the day I became a wrestling fan, it was the Ultimate Warrior that I always admired the most, and the Ultimate Warrior has the dubious honor of having been my first-ever favorite wrestler.<\/span><\/p>\n Man,\u00a0do I regret now not ever buying one of his paintings<\/a>, full of inch-thick oils.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Throughout my life and all the years that I\u2019ve been brogging, I\u2019ve named many wrestlers, and declared them among my favorites.\u00a0 CM Punk, Chris Benoit, the Big Boss Man, etc, etc.\u00a0 It\u2019s not due to the\u00a0unfortunate recent event of his passing, but I can truthfully say without any hesitation that my first ever favorite wrestler … Continue reading Ultimate reminiscing<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[171,15,99,54,55],"class_list":["post-38906","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-brog","tag-eulogy","tag-og","tag-reminiscing","tag-wrestling","tag-wwe"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38906","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=38906"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38906\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":38910,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38906\/revisions\/38910"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=38906"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=38906"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=38906"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![when playing the 1989 arcade\u00a0WWF Superstars<\/em><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\nWhen I was eight-years old, I once went to school with rubberbands around my non-existent prepubescent triceps with twist-ties draped off of them and declared myself the Ultimate Warrior.\u00a0 My teacher made me take them off because she believed that they were cutting off circulation in my arms.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/p>\nThe first time I saw Ultimate Warrior in action was in a match against Haku, on\u00a0Prime Time Wrestling<\/em>, which starred Gorilla Monsoon and Bobby \u201cThe Brain\u201d Heenan.\u00a0 I swear to god Warrior did at least nine clotheslines in that match, which he naturally won.<\/span><\/p>\nI was devastated in 1991 when Ultimate Warrior lost the world title to Sgt. Slaughter, due to outside interference from Sensational Sherry and the Macho King, when Randy Savage smashed his glass scepter on Warrior\u2019s head.\u00a0 I still thought wrestling was \u201creal\u201d then, so to a nine-year old, watching your favorite wrestler lose was adequate reasons for some shell shock.<\/span><\/p>\nI\u00a0always picked Ultimate Warrior when\u00a0WWF Wrestlefest<\/em>\u00a0<\/a>released in arcades in 1991.<\/span><\/p>\nWhen the Undertaker sneak-attacked the Ultimate Warrior during a\u00a0Funeral Parlor<\/em>\u00a0segment and then stuffed him into a casket, where he portrayed passing out after running out of air, I became scared out of my wits of the Undertaker.<\/span><\/p>\nWhen Papa Shango \u201ccursed\u201d the Ultimate Warrior, and there was a segment of him \u201cvomiting\u201d in the trainer\u2019s room, I developed a temporary belief and fear of voodoo magic.<\/span><\/p>\nNeedless to say, I was a very impressionable and gullible kid back then, but none of these memories were remotely at all difficult to recollect, because the Ultimate Warrior was my favorite wrestler.<\/span><\/p>\nBack when I was in high school, and I was already educated and smarky about the business, my friends and I had already heard all the rumors and the jokes, about how the Ultimate Warrior was dead, and that they\u2019ve had several different guys portraying him throughout the later years.\u00a0 We even ran with the joke for a spell, and came up with our own wild hypothetical scenario that somewhere out in the middle of nowhere (Parts Unknown) stood a temple, known as\u00a0The<\/em>\u00a0Temple, where there were numerous men in robes who served there, and when an Ultimate Warrior died, a new robed man within the temple would pull back his hood, revealing a man with a wild hairdo and the iconic Ultimate Warrior face paint, thus giving birth to the next Ultimate Warrior; who would then emerge, enter the business and resume shaking ropes and giving incoherent babbling promos as his predecessors did.<\/span><\/p>\nBut in reality, there weren\u2019t multiple Ultimate Warriors, there was no The Temple, or no number of dead preceding Ultimate Warriors.\u00a0 (Yes, I know there\u2019s a remark about the Ultimate Warrior WCW counterfeit AKA The Renegade, who is ironically dead as well.)\u00a0 There was always just one Ultimate Warrior, born James Hellwig, who later legally changed his name to Warrior, believing that it would give him legal right to the name over the WWE (which I\u2019m not entirely sure if it worked), that ever existed.<\/span><\/p>\nAnd now, unfortunately, he is no longer with us.<\/span><\/p>\nI\u2019ve written about lots of wrestlers who have passed in the past, and in most cases the basic message is the same: another wrestler gone way too early.\u00a0 At just 54 years old, the Ultimate Warrior falls into that category as well.\u00a0 Some wrestler deaths have been legitimately shocking (Benoit), most others are usually sentimental for ironic (Big Boss Man) or humorous (Viscera) reasons, and then there are some that are just plain tragically sad (Randy Savage, Eddie Guerrero), but I don\u2019t not miss any one of those guys, and definitely feel empathy for their families for their losses.<\/span><\/p>\nBut the passing of the Ultimate Warrior kind of encapsulates all of the above in his passing, because at least once, he fell into every one of those categories throughout his existence, and on top of that, he was my first-ever favorite wrestler as a kid, so it is somewhat notable to me that such an outrageously crazy character\u2019s passing invokes some melancholy emotions.<\/span><\/p>\nCertainly, the circumstances behind his death are conveniently ready for skepticism, but in the end, I still think it\u2019s a tragic freak accident, probably not aided by an abusive past lifestyle of steroids and other drugs that professional wrestlers were notorious for being associated with.\u00a0 He collapsed in a parking lot in the company of his wife, instead of being found dead in a hotel room with bottles of pills and booze strewn about, so I\u2019d like to rule out the possibility of a planned suicide.\u00a0 But despite my knee-jerk reaction that something seemed amiss, I don\u2019t think it was suicide, even if, in his last televised appearances, two days before his passing, he\u00a0basically gave his own eulogy<\/a>\u00a0to a raucous New Orleans crowd.<\/span><\/p>\nDespite the fact that in more recent years, he seemed to harbor a lot of animosity towards all known past associates, be it wrestlers, promoters, Vince McMahon and Hulk Hogan to name a few, we can at least take solace in the fact that the last words he said to a public audience were coherent, gracious, and full of acknowledgement and gratitude that without us wrestling fans, the Ultimate Warrior would never have become the legend he was.<\/span><\/p>\nIn conclusion: farewell Jim Hellwig, the Ultimate Warrior.\u00a0 You may have been a target of bad jokes, political disagreement, criticism over your performance capabilities and rambling promos, and questionability over your own identity and whether or not you had clones out there.\u00a0 But there\u2019s no denying the fact that the day I became a wrestling fan, it was the Ultimate Warrior that I always admired the most, and the Ultimate Warrior has the dubious honor of having been my first-ever favorite wrestler.<\/span><\/p>\nMan,\u00a0do I regret now not ever buying one of his paintings<\/a>, full of inch-thick oils.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Throughout my life and all the years that I\u2019ve been brogging, I\u2019ve named many wrestlers, and declared them among my favorites.\u00a0 CM Punk, Chris Benoit, the Big Boss Man, etc, etc.\u00a0 It\u2019s not due to the\u00a0unfortunate recent event of his passing, but I can truthfully say without any hesitation that my first ever favorite wrestler … Continue reading Ultimate reminiscing<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[171,15,99,54,55],"class_list":["post-38906","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-brog","tag-eulogy","tag-og","tag-reminiscing","tag-wrestling","tag-wwe"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38906","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=38906"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38906\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":38910,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38906\/revisions\/38910"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=38906"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=38906"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=38906"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}](\"http:\/\/totfc.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/07\/wwfsuperstars.png\"){kind=link}
![always picked Ultimate Warrior when\u00a0WWF Wrestlefest<\/em>\u00a0<\/a>released in arcades in 1991.<\/span><\/p>\nWhen the Undertaker sneak-attacked the Ultimate Warrior during a\u00a0Funeral Parlor<\/em>\u00a0segment and then stuffed him into a casket, where he portrayed passing out after running out of air, I became scared out of my wits of the Undertaker.<\/span><\/p>\nWhen Papa Shango \u201ccursed\u201d the Ultimate Warrior, and there was a segment of him \u201cvomiting\u201d in the trainer\u2019s room, I developed a temporary belief and fear of voodoo magic.<\/span><\/p>\nNeedless to say, I was a very impressionable and gullible kid back then, but none of these memories were remotely at all difficult to recollect, because the Ultimate Warrior was my favorite wrestler.<\/span><\/p>\nBack when I was in high school, and I was already educated and smarky about the business, my friends and I had already heard all the rumors and the jokes, about how the Ultimate Warrior was dead, and that they\u2019ve had several different guys portraying him throughout the later years.\u00a0 We even ran with the joke for a spell, and came up with our own wild hypothetical scenario that somewhere out in the middle of nowhere (Parts Unknown) stood a temple, known as\u00a0The<\/em>\u00a0Temple, where there were numerous men in robes who served there, and when an Ultimate Warrior died, a new robed man within the temple would pull back his hood, revealing a man with a wild hairdo and the iconic Ultimate Warrior face paint, thus giving birth to the next Ultimate Warrior; who would then emerge, enter the business and resume shaking ropes and giving incoherent babbling promos as his predecessors did.<\/span><\/p>\nBut in reality, there weren\u2019t multiple Ultimate Warriors, there was no The Temple, or no number of dead preceding Ultimate Warriors.\u00a0 (Yes, I know there\u2019s a remark about the Ultimate Warrior WCW counterfeit AKA The Renegade, who is ironically dead as well.)\u00a0 There was always just one Ultimate Warrior, born James Hellwig, who later legally changed his name to Warrior, believing that it would give him legal right to the name over the WWE (which I\u2019m not entirely sure if it worked), that ever existed.<\/span><\/p>\nAnd now, unfortunately, he is no longer with us.<\/span><\/p>\nI\u2019ve written about lots of wrestlers who have passed in the past, and in most cases the basic message is the same: another wrestler gone way too early.\u00a0 At just 54 years old, the Ultimate Warrior falls into that category as well.\u00a0 Some wrestler deaths have been legitimately shocking (Benoit), most others are usually sentimental for ironic (Big Boss Man) or humorous (Viscera) reasons, and then there are some that are just plain tragically sad (Randy Savage, Eddie Guerrero), but I don\u2019t not miss any one of those guys, and definitely feel empathy for their families for their losses.<\/span><\/p>\nBut the passing of the Ultimate Warrior kind of encapsulates all of the above in his passing, because at least once, he fell into every one of those categories throughout his existence, and on top of that, he was my first-ever favorite wrestler as a kid, so it is somewhat notable to me that such an outrageously crazy character\u2019s passing invokes some melancholy emotions.<\/span><\/p>\nCertainly, the circumstances behind his death are conveniently ready for skepticism, but in the end, I still think it\u2019s a tragic freak accident, probably not aided by an abusive past lifestyle of steroids and other drugs that professional wrestlers were notorious for being associated with.\u00a0 He collapsed in a parking lot in the company of his wife, instead of being found dead in a hotel room with bottles of pills and booze strewn about, so I\u2019d like to rule out the possibility of a planned suicide.\u00a0 But despite my knee-jerk reaction that something seemed amiss, I don\u2019t think it was suicide, even if, in his last televised appearances, two days before his passing, he\u00a0basically gave his own eulogy<\/a>\u00a0to a raucous New Orleans crowd.<\/span><\/p>\nDespite the fact that in more recent years, he seemed to harbor a lot of animosity towards all known past associates, be it wrestlers, promoters, Vince McMahon and Hulk Hogan to name a few, we can at least take solace in the fact that the last words he said to a public audience were coherent, gracious, and full of acknowledgement and gratitude that without us wrestling fans, the Ultimate Warrior would never have become the legend he was.<\/span><\/p>\nIn conclusion: farewell Jim Hellwig, the Ultimate Warrior.\u00a0 You may have been a target of bad jokes, political disagreement, criticism over your performance capabilities and rambling promos, and questionability over your own identity and whether or not you had clones out there.\u00a0 But there\u2019s no denying the fact that the day I became a wrestling fan, it was the Ultimate Warrior that I always admired the most, and the Ultimate Warrior has the dubious honor of having been my first-ever favorite wrestler.<\/span><\/p>\nMan,\u00a0do I regret now not ever buying one of his paintings<\/a>, full of inch-thick oils.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Throughout my life and all the years that I\u2019ve been brogging, I\u2019ve named many wrestlers, and declared them among my favorites.\u00a0 CM Punk, Chris Benoit, the Big Boss Man, etc, etc.\u00a0 It\u2019s not due to the\u00a0unfortunate recent event of his passing, but I can truthfully say without any hesitation that my first ever favorite wrestler … Continue reading Ultimate reminiscing<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[171,15,99,54,55],"class_list":["post-38906","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-brog","tag-eulogy","tag-og","tag-reminiscing","tag-wrestling","tag-wwe"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38906","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=38906"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38906\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":38910,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38906\/revisions\/38910"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=38906"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=38906"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=38906"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}](\"http:\/\/totfc.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/07\/wrestlefest.gif\"){kind=link}